A LeBron James team is never desperate.
My goal was just to try and be the best player on my high school team, and look where I am now. And that was still my goal as a young kid, just to try and be a little better than my brother was.
Anytime you've got an opportunity to play for your country and win a gold medal, I think that takes it all. That's the greatest thing you could ever achieve in your sport. So, I have been very fortunate to play on great teams, but the gold medal was probably the best.
A lot of people are doubting us right now, ... But the reality is that we've lost two conference games on the last play of the game. . . . We have a lot of freshmen and sophomores running around out there, and they're good players. You look at us on paper, and I think we have the chance to develop into a very good football team this year and into next.
There wouldn't be any way I could have jumped into Cup with the success I had without the truck series. I wish I had more time to spend there. There are so many things the truck teaches you about aerodynamics, the professional ranks of racing, and working with a professional team.
For us to be the team that got him that historic 10th championship is special for us.
So it was a win-win all the way around. It was an amazing moment, not only for myself and the team behind the film, but for DTS and for John Lasseter. He was always a big fan. He was a proponent, a supporter of the whole thing, and it just worked out.
There is a whole separate filmmaking team that's doing it, but that's part of what's great about the Brain Trust and about the inspiring leadership of John Lasseter. He leaves it up to that creative group of individuals to help each other elevate each thing that they're working on to only try to make it better and to share what you've learned on the first one.
No matter what your goals are, you've got to bring other people onto your team. For one thing, if you surround yourself with people who want to be successful, you become successful.
Everyone on my team is different in terms of how long before a workout they prefer to eat. I like to eat my big meal 4.5-5 hours before I play. I usually eat a carb either rice or pasta with tofu or chicken. Around 2 hours before I play to like to eat greek yogurt with a banana.
Back in Kansas City, I associated Harvard with sort of gnarly guys who wore capes for effect in a kind of Oscar Wilde scene. Even though I also knew there was such a thing as the Harvard-Yale game, I was still a little surprised that Harvard had a football team. I just assumed if there were such a thing as gay people, that they were nothing like us. Little did I know that probably half the swim team at Yale was gay.
The truck was really fast, we just couldn't get a long enough green flag run there toward the end to get a good run on Todd and Skinner. But we were fast. Randy Goss, David Dollar and everyone on the No. 47 team and at Morgan Dollar gave me an awesome truck to drive tonight. We ran out of time to get back up there and race them for win.
I was the guy on the swim team entertaining the bus on the way to the meets.
Leadership is not about sitting and presiding, it's about a going somewhere. To be buoyant, you must not only ignite passion around a common quest, you must also mobilize your team to take a journey with you toward a common destination, or what I call a "real ambition."
I feel like a new person. I learned how to deal with people when I wasn't a football player. I always wondered how they'd react to me, if they'd respect me. I found out I have other attributes that I like-and that others like. The injury made me a lot more mature. I have a better grasp of reality in life. I'm more patient and giving. I'm a lot closer to my family and more team oriented. I'm so much stronger emotionally. I have proven to myself that I can overcome the most dreaded injury in football. It's almost like dying and realizing life has been given back to me. I can't wait to play.
There's a team of filmmakers who follow me in the streets when I'm finding these models, to give me a sense of legitimacy to a casual stranger. This is New York City. No one's going to follow you back to your studio.
For example, in one of my last exhibitions I had a 50-foot massive painting with I think perhaps a hundred thousand hand-painted small flowers. This was the Christ painting [The Dead Christ in the Tomb, 2008] in my Down exhibition [2008]. Now, I simply can't spend eight hours a day painting small, identical flowers. And so I've got a team that allows me to have these grand, sweeping statements.
Creating open teamwork is the best way to encourage innovation.
I wish no teams had cheerleaders. I find it more distracting than anything else.
We're not going to walk into the World Cup thinking, 'Ah, you know, we beat Norway 5-0 and we beat Japan so now we're great and we're untouchable'. It's a reality check for a few guys and that's a good thing at this time so it doesn't happen on June 12 (when the U.S. team opens World Cup play against the Czech Republic).
I've kept in touch with many of my former teammates: Bob Marcucci was our team manager and we bonded over our passion for baseball.
This is the face of our political class: arrogant, authoritarian, and on the level of some banana republic south of the border. Welcome to the New America, where leader-worship has taken the place of politics, Team Red and Team Blue battle it out to see who gets to be El Supremo for the next four years, and politics resembles a prolonged soccer game.
Experience tells us that few matches are won on the back of one or two good sessions of play. To win a Test match most teams have to win and outplay the opposition for extended periods of time.
Lionel Messi is very much the team player, while Cristiano is very ego-driven.
Everything I write tends to turn into a superhero team, even if I didn't mean for it to. I always start off wanting to be solitary, because a) it's simpler, and b) that isolation is something that I relate to as a storyteller. And then no matter what, I always end up with a team.
